Simultaneous Inference of Genetic Parameters Underlying Susceptibility and Infectivity of Livestock from Epidemiological Data

Abstract Text:

The implementation of animal breeding programs to select for disease resistance can be a very helpful control strategy. However, usual quantitative genetics models cannot cope with the complex features inherent in epidemiological data, mainly because these models fail to accommodate the transmission dynamics from the population undergoing an epidemic. In this paper, we show how parameters related to infectivity and susceptibility traits can be simultaneously estimated by including the disease dynamics into the model.  Preliminary results show that the proposed genetic-epidemiological model can be a promising tool to estimate breeding values and covariance matrices of infectious disease traits when taking into account not only variation in susceptibility but also the usually neglected variation in infectivity.

Keywords:

Disease genetics

Bayesian statistics

Infectious disease